Sleep, baby, sleep,Our Saviour watch doth keep:He is the Lamb of God on high,Who for our sake came down to die;Sleep, baby, sleep.
Sleep, baby, sleep,Our Saviour watch doth keep:He is the Lamb of God on high,Who for our sake came down to die;Sleep, baby, sleep.
Sleep, baby, sleep,Our Saviour watch doth keep:He is the Lamb of God on high,Who for our sake came down to die;Sleep, baby, sleep.
The tune was exquisite and simple, simple and exquisite were the words. And Hugh sang, as the artist always sings, as if this particular song was the one that he had longed and lived to sing. There was the same perfection as he had shown downstairs, and there was no more perfection possible.
“And now you’ll go to sleep, Sitonim?” he said.
“I couldn’t help it,” said Daisy.
At that Mrs. Allbutt went swiftly and silently to her room, and closed the door craftily.
It was all this she thought over, expecting the hair-brushing visit from Peggy. She could have given no precise account of why it should have so taken possession of her mind, except in so far that to the musical soul the marvel of a beautiful voice is a wonder that is ever new. But it was not Hugh’s singing alone that had so stirred her; more than all it was this little vignette seen through the chink of the nursery door of this radiant youth, with his radiant voice, lying with his head on Daisy’s pillow, singing in order to free this very obstinate child from her vow of sitting up until he sang to her, while all the time he knew quite well that he ought not to sing at all, even if the Pope asked him to—nor probably in the latter case would he have done so. And, like an artist, he had not mumbled or whispered, though he was only singing to one small girl by the illumination of a night-light; he had sung as if all the world was listening, as if his career hung on each note. Yet the same boy had rather turned up his nose at the idea of singing Walter, Tristan, and Lohengrin at Covent Garden; it appeared to be much better worth while, even in defiance of his master’s orders, to sing Daisy to sleep.
Peggy followed soon after, having peeped in at the nursery door and seen that Daisy was already fast asleep.
“Nurse doesn’t know how to manage that child,” she said, with an air of extreme superiority. “I went up and just said she had to go to sleep, and that there was no question of Hugh coming to sing to her. It’s what they call suggestion.”
Edith could not help laughing.
“But he did go and sing to her,” said she. “I heard and saw him.”
“Oh! The suggestion plan rather falls to the ground then. He oughtn’t to have done it, but it’s quite exactlylike him. He wouldn’t sing any more for us, but Daisy is a different matter. He can sing fairly well, can’t he?”
“I feel rather the reverse of Daisy,” said Edith. “I feel as if I shan’t go to sleep because he sang. Oh, Peggy, if you have any influence with him, do use it and make him go on the stage! I really think that there is a moral duty attaching to a gift like that, just as there is a moral duty attaching to great wealth. Mr. Grainger can’t have been given that just to sing to you and me and Daisy.”
“I know, but the worst of it is that that is just the argument one cannot use to Hugh. It would make me blush purple to say that to him.”
“But why?”
“Because, whatever else he is, he is absolutely free from self-consciousness. And your argument, though undoubtedly a true one, suggests self-consciousness. Oh, I hate the word duty even! To say that a thing is one’s duty implies one is thinking about oneself, though no doubt from most excellent motives and for the sake of other people. But when you get a boy like Hugh, whose huge kindly instincts take the place of duty, it would be really like corrupting him to suggest that he had duties, or that talents were given him for reasons.”
Edith walked up and down the room considering this.
“Do you remember Comte’s remark when the doctors told him he was dying? He said ‘Quel per te irréparable,’”continued Peggy. “There’s the opposite of Hugh.”
“All the same, it was an irreparable loss,” said Edith, “and so are the years in which Mr. Grainger remains a private nightingale. He told me this evening that he had been asked whether he would sing in three Wagner operas next year. Oh, make him, Peggy! Or hasn’t he got stern parents of any description, or musical uncles who will cut him off with a penny if he doesn’t?”
“Well, we’ll try. I didn’t know they had made him a definite offer. But though you might not think it, Hugh is wonderfully obstinate. People clatter and shriek all around him, and he sits in the middle, brilliant and smiling and patient till they have quite finished. And then he goes on exactly as before.”
“He might do worse,” said Mrs. Allbutt. “By the way, will you ask him to the box for the first night of ‘Gambits’? You haven’t asked anybody else yet have you?”
“No; I didn’t know whether you wanted anybody in particular. I think three will be enough. Four in a box usually means that the two men are frigidly polite to one another; and both sit at the very back of the box and see nothing whatever. It’s much better to be three, so that we can all put our elbows on the cushion. Were you at the rehearsal to-day?”
“Oh, yes; I went to see a little more of my grave dug! From the way things are getting on, it should be quite ready for me to lie down in on Thursday night.”
“My dear, what nonsense! Besides, every manager likes rehearsals to go badly. Good rehearsals mean a bad first night. Bad rehearsals give a sort of courage of despair, which is far the most efficient sort. Oh, Edith, it’s good too, and you know it! Dear Andrew Robb! What a name to have chosen! Anyhow, I don’t think a soul has guessed who wrote it.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have,” said Edith. “Nobody knows except you and Mr. Jervis, and I never speak to him in the theatre. He always comes to see me afterwards, and we make what we can out of the rather undecipherable notes I have scribbled.”
Again she moved restlessly up and down the room.
“But whatever happens,” she said, “I shall never regret having written it. It really kept me alive and sane, Peggy, during the first two years after Dennis’s death. I think I must have gone mad otherwise. But the bringing to birth of that child of one’s brain kept me alive; and whether it proves to be a miserable little deformed cripple or a healthy baby is another question.”
Peggy rose to go.
“Ah, you darling!” she said, kissing her. “And it is all healed now, is it not?”
Edith smiled at her.
“Yes, I think it is healed,” she said. “But you know things can’t be quite the same; it can never be quite as if those years had never happened. If one has had a wound, a burn, though the skin grows over it and the doctors say it has healed perfectly, yet it isn’t soft and smooth like other skin. It is hard, as if Nature instinctively gave an extra protection over the place that had been hurt. And this was over my heart, dear.”
Peggy sighed.
“I know you think like that,” she said, “but you won’t always. Think how much you have regained of yourself in these three years. How much of you there is again, when a year or two ago, dear Edith, there was so little of anything. Make it complete again some day.”
“Marry, do you mean?” asked she.
“Why, of course. No woman is herself until she finds her man. And really, dear, you are beginning to sit up and take notice, as they say of children. Do find him!”
“At the age of forty-two it requires a good deal of search,” said Edith.
“You are not forty-two. People don’t have any age until they cease to matter. You matter immensely. Why, supposing I were to go about London saying you were forty-two, people would say that I must be fifty! No woman is any age until people cease to care about her.”
Edith shook her head.
“Oh, Peggy, if one suffers, then certain things become unrecapturable! One begins some day to acquiesce in one’s limitations. When one is really young everything is possible; when one is old most things are inconceivable.”
“Now you are talking like Andrew Robb,” remarked Peggy.
“Of course, because I am. One’s age is measured by what one expects from life. And to be quite candid, dear, I expect very little. I hope on my own account to continue being moderately agreeable, and quite patient, and quite pleased that other people should enjoy themselves. But as for the heart-beat, the long breath—why, that is finished.”
“That is the ridiculous heresy that women only love once,” said Peggy. “I have known heaps of women who have loved heaps of times. They have told me so themselves.”
“Go to bed, Peggy, because you are getting flippant. You don’t understand. Pleasures? Good gracious, yes, I hope to have lots of them. I shall go mad with pleasure if Andrew Robb proves successful; I shall look forward even for a whole year to seeing Mr. Grainger play Lohengrin, just as for a whole year I shall look forward to seeing whether the Delphiniums you sent me will do well at Mannington. I shall——”
“Oh, darling, you shall shut up!” said Peggy decisively. “You may call me flippant, but you are cynical,whether I call it you or not, when you speak of expecting nothing more from life. And I would sooner be anything than cynical—even a dentist. Where will you breakfast? And whymyMr. Grainger? Answer categorically, please, and don’t argue, because it is late.”
Edith laughed.
“Categorically then, it is your Mr. Grainger because you introduced him to me: I will breakfast in my room, and I want two eggs. Otherwise I don’t get through the morning.”
“Indeed? What happens instead?”
“It is interminable, of course.”
“You shall have three,” said Peggy.
No sort of grass, not even the commonest varieties, ever grew under Peggy’s feet, and thus having promised to see what could be done with regard to inducing Hugh to accept this offer of the Opera Syndicate, she laid her plans next morning without loss of time, and instead of going to church as she ought to have done, sent Toby there with Chopimalive and Sitonim—who had slept till morning—and announced to Hugh that the whole duty of this particular man was to take her out in a punt.
“And Mrs. Allbutt?” he asked.
“Will lunch with us at one-thirty,” said Peggy.
This was in the nature of an ultimatum, and Hugh, when it was thus put firmly before him, behaved like the Sultan of Turkey and did as he was told. But Peggy was not quite sure that there was not, so to speak, a good deal of Moslem-fanaticism smouldering below this apparent docility. However, she established herself comfortably on a heap of cushions, and, remarking on the beauty of the view, put up a huge contadina umbrella that extinguished it for miles round.
“Now, we won’t go far,” she said, “because you will get so dreadfully hot punting. Simply broiling, isn’t it? Oh, Hugh, how beautifully you do it! I’m sure you would win all the punt-races if you went in for them.”
Hugh put his head on one side, as if listening very carefully; then, having considered this remark in all its bearings, he put his tongue in his cheek. His face, however, was hidden from Peggy by the expanse of the red umbrella, and she went guilelessly on.
“You do such a lot of things so nicely,” she went on, “but you never do anything with them. I’m sure you could write a beautiful fairy-story just like ‘Alice through the Looking-Glass.’”
“You mean ‘In Wonderland,’ I suppose?” said Hugh.
“I dare say. Or you could win punting races.”
Hugh removed his tongue from his cheek merely because he wanted it for the purposes of speech. Figuratively, it was there still.
“I am writing a volume of fairy-tales—several, in fact,” he said; “and I am going in for the punting championship of Northern Europe.”
“Oh, how can you tell such stories?” said Peggy.
“Easily. There’s not the slightest difficulty about it. You had better put down your parasol a moment. I am going to tie up underneath those trees.”
“Oh, but we’ve hardly gone a hundred yards!” said she.
“No; but it is clearly your purpose to argue with me. I can’t argue while I’m punting. If you like, we will drift down mid-stream, but there are a good many excursion steamers about.”
They tied up accordingly just below Odney Weir, and since Peggy intended to begin arguing at once, itdid not seem worth while to disclaim the intention of doing so.
“You sing so well too,” she said. “Surely you ought to do something with some of those things? Now, don’t interrupt; as you insist on it, I did come out to argue with you.”
“But the argument is to be conducted without any interruption from me?” asked Hugh.
“Yes. You see, you are twenty-four, aren’t you?—which is really middle-age nowadays, when everybody is past everything at forty, and it’s time you did something. It doesn’t really matter much what you do, as long as you do something. ‘Men must work,’ as Mr. Kingsley said.”
Dead silence from Hugh, according to instructions. Peggy wanted to argue the question on general lines and make him suggest singing as a profession, since she did not officially know of this offer of the Opera Syndicate. Hence she continued with glorious generalisations.
“You see, it is a necessity to work,” she said, “for all of us, though I think Mr. Kingsley said that women only had to weep, but I cease at this point to use him as an authority. Good heavens, how dull I should find London if I only went to luncheon and dinner and balls and concerts! Life is simply idiotic unless you do something. And doing things is much more necessary for men than for women, because men are not naturally frivolous; they are only frivolous because women ask them to play about, like—like the flower-maidens and Parsifal.”
Hugh gave a little explosion of laughter.
“I beg your pardon!” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Then don’t, because I am going on until I have finished. Good gracious, I think that one of the saddest sights that the world has to show is an unoccupied bachelor, who is always ready to go out to tea, or make the fourteenth, when there would otherwise be thirteen! I have been in a good many slums and factories and shelters, but I have never seen anything quite so sad as that.”
“You must have been reading the works of President Roosevelt!” said Hugh.
“Not one line, but I have occasionally driven up and down St. James’s Street and looked at the row of bald heads, back to the windows in clubs. Those wretches read theTimes, or more probably theDaily Mail, all morning, and totter out to lunch. They read some pink or green paper all afternoon, and totter out to dinner. Then they go to bed, and close their weary eyes till late on in the following morning. Hugh, you will become like them if you don’t take care.”
“May I speak?” asked he.
“No. I am much older than you, because I am thirty-eight, though I don’t look it, and you needn’t say that. And all through those fourteen years which separate us I have been always learning one thing—that happiness lies in being busy. Years——”
Then the romantic, the picturesque, that always beats in Celtic blood—and she was half Irish—came to her tongue.
“The years, or time, whatever it is, are like a golden river that flows round us,” she said. “You may just sit in it, as you are doing, and watch the golden iridescent stream flowing and combing round you. That is letting it run to waste. But use your brain, Hughie, and let your brain talk to your fingers, and let your fingers pull a bit of the water into your grasp, and that whichyou thought was only just water, just the passage of time in this heavenly world, is a real tangible thing, a golden thing, and your fingers will make a golden something—a book or a statue or a song—out of it. You must mould and carve this bit of time, and when it is finished you will let it float down again on the golden river of time, and those who come after will see it and handle it.”
He did not want to interrupt now. Peggy, as he well knew, was “doing” something for more hours in the day and for more days in the year than any one he knew, and it was not often that this vein of romance surged to the surface. She had quite forgotten, it must be confessed, the missionary enterprise on which she had set out an hour ago at her sister’s suggestion. Just now she was speaking not from another’s wish, but out of her own heart.
“Oh, we ought all to be so busy!” she said, “grasping at the golden time and moulding it, every drop of it, into golden images! Also, when we do that, we are not only using time, we are saving it. It is all ours, and it is only spent and wasted when we let it go by. Whatever we make of it is invested; it becomes things of gold that float down on the golden river. Ah, don’t you see, Hughie?”
He was grave, too, now.
“Then do I waste time when I tell the children fairy-stories and sing to you?” he asked.
“No, you dear; but make bigger things. Write your book of fairy-stories, which you said you were writing—only I didn’t believe you! Or win a punt race even—only I didn’t believe you! Take hold of the world somehow, sing to it, or—or do anything to it,” she added, afraid she had betrayed her knowledge.
Hugh was extremely susceptible, using that word not in the confined sense of being easily influenced by a woman, but in the larger meaning of being quick to be caught by an idea. To be a weather-cock is a phrase that has had attached to it a sense, if not opprobrious, at any rate a little depreciatory; but in reality to be fitted with that simile is the highest praise, since it implies the wonderful sensitiveness of the temperament that is never other than artistic. To catch and to record the faintest breeze that blows is a better gift than to stand four-square like a tower and defy the winds of heaven. It is not denied that the four-square towers are eminently useful, and, as far as usefulness of this sort is concerned, the weather-cock is not in any way comparable to them. Yet the blowing and breathing of the winds is perhaps worth record, and the towers do not show it. And if Hugh was obstinate, as Peggy had declared he was, he was obstinate perhaps with the deadly obstinacy of weather-cocks, which, however much the world in general shouts “Northeast!” will continue to register southwest if it seem to them that the wind is coming from that quarter. There may be clattering and screaming, as she had said, but the weather-cock goes on exactly as before. On this occasion Hugh, perhaps because he had received commands, did not argue and even when Peggy said “Well, what have you got to say?” only pleaded her original command in defence. But his tongue had been in his cheek before, and as he punted her back again for lunch it again came out.
“I want to ask you one question,” he said. “But pray don’t answer it unless you wish. Did Mrs. Allbutt tell you that the Opera Syndicate had made me a certain offer? Mind, I don’t draw any conclusions if you refuse to answer.”
Peggy had put up the huge red umbrella again, but at this she put it down with a snap.
“Hughie, I will never tell you not to talk again,” she said, “for I believe you guess best when you are silent. When did you guess?”
“Oh, I guessed right at the beginning!” he said.
“But I did it very well,” she said.
“Quite beautifully. And you used beautiful language about the golden river. But——”
“Well?” asked Peggy.
“Oh, nothing particular! I was only going to suggest that it would have been simpler to have advised me at once to accept their offer; or at any rate, to have asked me whether I intended to, instead of suggesting that I should go in for punt-racing. Mrs. Allbutt also advises me to accept. But I have practically made up my mind not to. Here we are again at home; what a pleasant morning.”
PEGGY RYE, probably one of the happiest people in London, was unquestionably one of the busiest, and, as is the habit of really busy people, could always find time for everything. She pursued her myriad schemes of philanthropy and kindness not only with a sense of duty, but brought to them a lively and genuine interest that made unshrinkable homespuns, innocuous wallpapers, unphosphorescent matches and leadless glaze things in themselves attractive and absorbing. If she was not opening a bazaar she was triumphantly closing some factory in which the conditions of work were injurious to theemployés; and there were but few days when she was in town on which her great barrack of a house in Pall-Mall was not open to something of an alleviating and charitable nature. The house, in fact, as Hugh had once remarked, was a sort of Clapham Junction of philanthropy, and relief trains ran screaming through it in all directions and at the shortest possible intervals, while she, like a general pointsman for all the lines, tugged at her levers and sent the trains all on their various ways. Her levers, it may be remarked, were of various kinds, and it was firstly her own energies, her position, her time, her wealth that she cheerfully and eagerly devoted to her charitable deeds; but secondly she used the time, position, and money of her friends, plundering them with the utmost avidity and mercilessness. She insisted on their putting up new wallpapers—even though those they had were still recent—which, though perhaps ugly, were not stained with the bloodof work-people. She made them buy homespun and tweeds which they did not want in order that Irish peasants should not want either; and she compelled them to load their dinner-tables with new services, which it was possible to eat off, she explained, in comfort, without the feeling at the back of your mind that every time you took a spoonful of soup you were really—so dreadful was the mortality at some of these china factories—committing an act of cannibalism. She even saw the bright side of the extreme friability of these uncannibal plates, because it so soon became necessary to order some more.
In the same way too she used her friends’ gifts; those who were musical had to play the piano or the violin or sing at her concerts at Rye House, while the less-gifted might confine themselves to taking guinea tickets; those with histrionic gifts were expected to place them at her service, and even go so far as to buy the dresses in which they would appear, and pay their fares to distant parts of the country in order to assist deserving objects in the manufacturing districts; poets, major and minor alike, wrote odes which the less poetical had to buy at really scandalous prices; those with gardens filled her bazaars with the finest orchids and all that was best and rarest in their greenhouses; and though Peggy was ruthless, persistent, and merciless in her demands nobody ever resented or refused them, and only when goaded past all bearing—as, for instant, when she wanted to give a bazaar during Ascot week—told her that, though she appeared not to know it, there were limits. For, as has been said, she had the most valuable of all social gifts—namely, the habit of enjoying herself, which is quite irresistible, and though she did not spare them, she was even more merciless to herself.
It must be remarked too that without taking a cynical view of the efforts and services of her friends, it was unquestionably a very comfortable thing for those of otherwise worldly inclinations to be friends of Peggy’s, for she did not confine herself, as might be gathered, to making the lower classes more comfortable at the cost of all comfort to the upper, but she ministered with the same eager unwearying kindness to their tastes, and if those who were musical, for instance, lent her their talents in aid of her schemes, she on her side was always ready to lend them her opera-box, and entertained largely both in town and country. She was also in this caravanserai of London one of the very few people who really “mattered,” and though her wealth and the way in which she spent it might be supposed to have something to do with this, such a supposition would be entirely false where there were so many more wealthy than she who would spend their uttermost farthing to “matter,” yet never succeeded in doing so. What mattered was her wisdom and her charm, and the cachet so seldom won, of a woman of this kind who instead of spending a busy life in amusing herself, spent it seriously in ameliorating the condition of the people, while at the same time she gave and went to dances, entertained and was entertained and was entertaining. Socially she enjoyed herself immensely, and with her big house, her genius as hostess, her deep-rooted desire that other people should enjoy themselves, especially at her expense, she was on a pinnacle in her own world, while, like some skilful circus-rider of two horses, she used all this to sell her guinea tickets and make people buy the leadless glaze of her innocuous dinner-services. She would, in fact, couple her invitation to a week-end party—not at the sequestered cottage at Cookham, but at the bighouse at Kingston—with a request for a couple of pianoforte solos from some renowned player at the forthcoming concert in aid of some specialised sort of cripples in a manner of which the significance could scarcely be missed.
Peggy had the rather rare and wholly enviable faculty of being able to sit down and think, and when sitting to arrange her thoughts, and having arranged the particular strain of them which occupied her, to dismiss them again. Thus when she left Cookham the following day in order to open a bazaar at the Waynfleet Hall in the afternoon, she lunched in the train, arranged her thoughts, which were concerned with the speech she was going to make, and when she arrived at Paddington was at leisure again, and able to give herself up to that most entrancing form of entertainment—namely, the mere watching of the busy, jostling life of the streets.
But how that spectacle enthralled her! To her keen and vivid mind there was no such delectable pasture on which to browse, and not even the liquid, dustless lawn and river were so entrancing. Much as she loved the swift play of mind on mind, much as she loved the mere quietude of Thames and green forest, or the idle, nonsensical, vivid intercourse with friends, or with friends the grave note that was often struck, there was nothing more attune to her than this sight of the eager crowded streets, alive with strangers, each an enigma to her and not less an enigma to himself. Hugh had once said to her that he always got up early even in this London of late hours for fear of missing something, and that sentiment appeared to her wholly admirable. What he was afraid of “missing” neither he nor she knew; indeed, had it been a definite “missing” it must have been an engagement or appointment of some sort,which would have been devoid of romance. It was the very vagueness of it that to her half-practical, half-Celtic mind was so attractive. “Something might have happened,” he had said, “and how dreadful to have been asleep like a pig!” That was so like him, and yet it was like him too, though unsatisfactory, that he should do nothing definite with this life, that he should refuse this wonderful offer to sing at Covent Garden. Artist-like, he had for the last four years absolutely devoted himself to the cultivation of his voice, spending the five winter months in every year in the desolating town of Frankfort, so as to allow no distraction to interfere with his lessons, and now when a practical reward for his industry was offered him he refused it. To her, as to Edith, it seemed almost a crime; a miracle of a voice had been given him, and also part, though not all, of the artistic temperament which, like genius, has unlimited capacities for taking pains. But what had been left out was ambition; he had, strong as an instinct, the internal need of learning all he could of the art of singing, but not the wish to dazzle and hold the world. It was for singing’s sake that for five months in every year he had cheerfully undergone the incomparable tedium of Frankfort, not for the sake of knowing that on the other side of the footlights the huge hushed house, packed from stall to gallery, was holding its breath in expectation while he stood before the masters in the meadow by the Pegnitz, or, as Tristan, strained dying eyes over the untenanted blue of the Cornish sea for the ship that came not, or voyaged miraculously on the swan to where by the Scheldt the maiden Elsa called on her unknown and nameless champion. That at present anyhow—the sting and goad of ambition, of impressinghimself on others—had not awoke in him; he did not in the least care whether the world knew that he sang as long as Reuss knew it and he knew it. To Edith his refusal seemed criminal, for never before, as far as she knew, had a man’s voice arrived so early at maturity, and perhaps at perfection. At last the ideal Wagner hero had come, one who was still young, still with all the glow and thrill of youth on him; at last it was possible to see a Tristan who was not middle-aged and obese, and a Lohengrin who should indeed be the ideal of a girl’s dream; and these possibilities were all ruled out because Hugh “didn’t want to.” It was as if the key that unlocked some priceless treasure was put into the hands of an idle, irresponsible child, who might throw open the jewelled case, but simply did not care to turn the key.
Peggy made an effort to bring back her thoughts into their more usual channels, for at this point she became aware again that she was driving down Pall Mall and wasting her time terribly in thinking about Hugh instead of devouring the crowded pavements, and she turned her attention to them. There was an elderly man exactly like a rabbit, talking with a curious nibbling movement of the mouth to a middle-aged woman whose face was like a chest of drawers, square, obviously useful, with knobs on it. Then she passed a hansom in which was sitting Arthur Crowfoot, one of those red-hot faddists who spend their whole time in pursuing health-giving practices. He had spent all April in deep-breathing, and one was liable to come across him even in the streets, or sitting on a little green chair in the Park, looking rather apoplectic because he was holding his breath for ten seconds previous to expelling it slowly through his left nostril while his right was firmly closedby his finger. Then he gave up deep-breathing, and devoted May to the open-air cure, being quite well already, with the result that he caught a dreadful cold. That, however, he had remedied by giving up eating flesh and living on a curious gray paste made of nuts and drinking water in sips for an hour or two every day. At this moment he was observing his tongue rather anxiously in the looking-glass of his hansom, and so did not see Peggy. She registered the premonition that nut-paste would probably be soon abandoned. How heavenly people were!
Then—she was really in luck—she found all sorts of enchanting things. A circus was going somewhere, and the elephant at this colossal moment did not want to go. Instead he wanted buns, and with a view to getting them had taken his stand, kindly but extremely firmly on the pavement opposite the Guards’ Club and had inserted his trunk through the open window of the smoking-room; he picked up aPall Mall, waved it hysterically in the air, and then ate it. A little further on two intensely English-looking men, appearing to be rather annoyed with each other, wanted to pass, the one going east, the other west. But, with aggrieved and offended faces, they danced a sort of sideways minuet in front of each other, choosing the same side simultaneously. Then a man on a bicycle approached, with a tied-up look about his face. Peggy could not imagine why he looked so tied-up, until a hideous convulsion seized him and he sneezed. The pavement had been lately watered, his bicycle skidded, and he fell off. And how she longed to go back and see whether the elephant had any more beautiful plans!
Mrs. Allbutt was staying while in London with her sister and brother-in-law, in the huge chocolate-colouredhouse in Piccadilly which Hugh had called the Clapham Junction of good works. Half a dozen families could easily have been accommodated there without coming into the contact too close for perfect liberty of action; and, as a matter of fact, friends and relations were encouraged to and did treat it rather like a hotel without bills. “For what,” as Peggy said, “is the use of dwelling in marble halls in this very central situation unless one’s friends will come and dwell there too?” So they came and dwelt, since Peggy with true hospitality besought everybody to make any arrangements they chose, to ask anybody to dinner or to go out to dinner, or to have high tea exactly as they wished without consultation or notice given to her provided only that one motor-car should be considered—as indeed it was—her private property, and not to be used without reference to her. Similarly, on days of big dinner parties she asked that the intentions of any of those staying with her should be notified as soon as convenient, so that the servants should not go mad; but in the ordinary routine, when one person was going to the opera, and another to the theatre, and a third dining quietly at home at eight, people simply went to the dining-room at the time they had appointed, and there, as by a miracle, always found that something was ready for them.
Thursday evening, in fact, the night when Andrew Robb was going to make his bow before the dramatic world, was a typical instance of an ordinary night. Lord Rye was going to the opera with his sister, and had ordered dinner for half-past seven. Peggy, Mrs. Allbutt, and Hugh were going to dine at seven, in order to be in time for the first fatal and excruciating rise of the curtain; while Frank Adams and his a week of whirl had been down to Ascot all day, and preferred to dineat home, and go to a ball afterward. Peggy herself had been delayed in a manner which it had been impossible to foresee over some charitable visit to the East End, and returned at exactly seven, meeting Edith as she came downstairs dressed on the way to her room.
“Darling, I am late,” she said, “and it wasn’t my fault. You look perfectly beautiful, and how you can be so calm! Go in with Hugh as soon as he comes, won’t you, and don’t wait for me, because we must be there in time.”
She whirled on to her room, and Edith, finding a letter or two for her on the table by the hall door, stopped to read them, and witnessed Hugh’s arrival, who, like Peggy, seemed somehow to be going faster than usual, and on dismounting instantly became involved in a dispute with the cabman.
“But as I haven’t got any money, I can’t pay you,” he said rather shrilly. “I forgot, as I tell you, to bring any, though I’m frightfully rich. But if you’ll call at Dover Street to-morrow——”
The cabman’s contribution to the dispute was to say “Cheating a pore cabby!” at intervals. He said it now.
“But you are so unreasonable,” continued Hugh. “No, I won’t give you my watch. Oh, there’s a footman! I dare say I can borrow some. Would you give me eighteen pence, please? No, a shilling.”
Hugh handed him the shilling.
“And if you hadn’t been so rude,” he said, “you should have had eighteenpence, so I hope it will be a lesson to you. Oh, there you are, Mrs. Allbutt! Aren’t cabmen ridiculous? Am I late?”
“Peggy is later,” she said. “She has only just come in. We are to begin without her.”
They went into the dining-room, in which were several small tables, and took their seats at one laid for three.
“I am never quite sure if I enjoy first nights,” said Hugh; “which sounds polite as I am going with you to one, but I am so agitated on behalf of the actors. And how the author can bear it at all is a thing that passes comprehension. I don’t see how he can bear to be present, and of course it would be beyond human power for him to stop away.”
“Ah, but the name of Andrew Robb inspires me with confidence!” said she. “The name doesn’t sound as if he was likely to be nervous.”
Hugh looked at her with deep interest.
“You don’t suppose there is an Andrew Robb, do you?” he asked. “I feel certain there isn’t. Nobody ever really was called that, do you think?”
“I don’t see any inherent impossibility in it.”
“Oh, surely it can’t happen! Do you often go to first nights?”
“Hardly ever,” said she. “Until this last fortnight, I don’t suppose I have slept in town half a dozen times in the last three years.”
“How wise.”
“Yet Peggy tells me that you are the most confirmed of Cockneys, and are in town nine months out of the twelve.”
“Yes; but then I like it,” said Hugh, eating fish very fast. “So that is wise also. How few people know what they like!”
“Yes, but does that surprise you? I think it is rather difficult to know what one likes. Anyhow, most people only see the world through the eyes of others. In consequence they only like, or think they like, what other people like.”
“I know what I like,” remarked Hugh roundly.
“And what is that?”
“Oh, almost everything!” he said.
“I sincerely congratulate you,” said she. “There is no gift so enviable as that of liking.”
Mrs. Allbutt, as Hugh noticed for the second time and more emphatically than before, had a voice of singular charm, and to him, to whom the ear was the main organ of communication between his soul and that of things external to him, it seemed a voice of wonderful temperament. It was very level in tone, and pitched on rather a low note for woman, but the quality of it was fine, clear but a little veiled, as if it came from really inside her brain, not from her throat merely. Her utterance, too, had great distinction; there was nothing slurred or clipped about it, the words stood up like flowers in a field, and her personality gave them its significance; what she said was no echo of other voices; it was genuine, personal, as much hers as her face or her cool long-fingered hands. Even had she talked mere gibberish her voice would have been a thing to listen to for the melody of it; as it was, its music was but the accompaniment to her thought so delightfully made audible. At the moment, however, while these very simple and sincere sounds still dwelt on his ear like song, Peggy, gorgeously though so hastily attired, came in with a rush, snapping a bracelet on to her wrist.
“Ah, but if only the Government would bring in an eight-hour day for the upper classes,” she cried, “how I would work for them—Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, whatever they were! I have been on the warpaths of charity since nine this morning, which makes ten hours already, and if you think I have done yet—why, you’re mistaken. I have been mistaken too, because I findthat my ladyship is at home at eleven, and I quite forgot. So you’ll come back with us, Hugh, won’t you, after the theatre? Can’t you? How tiresome of you! There’s going to be no dancing, but we are going to talk to each other for an hour. And at twelve a glass slipper of rather large size is coming for me, and I’m going to a ball. I wish I was dead!”
“No, dear, you don’t,” said Edith.
“Anyhow, why?” asked Hugh.
“Because I shan’t want to go out again, and I must. But one knows quite well that one enjoys everything when one is doing it. I even enjoyed my dentist yesterday, because he is a Christian Scientist and told me I had no nerves in my teeth, and even if I had they wouldn’t hurt, because mortal mind, as far as I understood him, did not really exist.”
“Then there should have been no teeth either,” remarked Hugh.
“I thought of that too, but my mouth was full of syringes and syphons and pads of cotton-wool so that I couldn’t talk. Oh, yes, doing things is always pleasant, whatever they are! Now you, Hugh, won’t do things.”
Hugh nodded at her.
“No; that is the other point of view. The one you don’t see.”
“Have you written to Reuss?”
“Not actually, because he refused to take any answer for a fortnight. But practically.”
“And what is the other point of view,” she demanded—“the one I don’t see?”
Hugh looked from one to the other; it seemed as if Mrs. Allbutt also was waiting to hear about the other point of view.
“Merely that to be effective, to do things, howeverexcellently, isn’t necessarily the only thing in the world worth living for. As you say, you like doing things; you would be bored and discontented if you were not flying about like—like——”
“Well?” said Peggy.
“Well, if you don’t mind, like a bee against a glass window,” said Hugh. “You go banging about in all directions, and stopping really in pretty much the same place.”
“You serpent!” said Peggy. “Pray go on!”
“I think I will, because I’ve been thinking about it, and I probably shall forget unless I say it soon. Oh, I think I was wrong about the bee and the glass window! At least, it only partly applies to you, for you do get through things, although, like the bee, you only charge wildly at them. But you like working sixteen hours a day and having no time for lunch; it pleases you. Add to that that you have a nice nature, and it follows that you work sixteen hours a day for the sake of other people. But——”
Hugh pointed an almost threatening finger at her.
“But if you had to work sixteen hours a day for yourself you wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do. You can improve the condition of other people to any extent, but you haven’t got any idea as to how to improve your own. The time would hang very heavy for you if you had to use it all in improving your mind. Consequently you tend to think that people who do try to improve their minds are lazy. You haven’t got any real sympathy with art or music or literature, and you mainly want me to go and squall at the opera because you feel that I shall then be doing something definite.”
Peggy put both her elbows on the table.
“Go on about me,” she said. “It’s deeply interesting. Coil and wriggle and sting, you dear serpent!”
“Very well. You are hopelessly conventional.”
Peggy gasped.
“Conventional?” she asked.
“Yes. You have often urged me, for instance, to go into Parliament, merely because it was the obvious thing to do. You yourself do all the conventional things with almost fanatical enthusiasm—bazaars, and Fridays in Lent, and garden parties to congenital idiots. It is all so stereotyped; there is nothing original about it, except when you induce your friends to buy dinner-services that melt and dissolve when the soup touches them, and then expect them to buy more. You can’t——”
Hugh paused a moment.
“Ah, I have it!” he said. “You can’t think of anything. And you don’t want to.”
Peggy looked at him in a sort of comic despair.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.
“Because you never thought of it before,” said he. “Oh, I know what I mean quite well! Do say it for me, Mrs. Allbutt,” he said, turning to her.
She smiled at him.
“Do you know the thing called the Æolian harp?” she said. “It is a matter of a few strings, and you put it up in a tree, and whatever happens, whether it blows a gale or whether the sun shines or whether it is frosty, the Æolian harp, as I imagine it, always responds and makes music of some kind.”
“Oh, but the Æolian harp—” began Peggy.
“Dear, this is a peculiar sort of Æolian harp. The ordinary one only makes sound when the wind blows, but I imagine one which turns everything into song.It is the romanticist, the dreamer. It is neither moral nor immoral; it is only exquisitely sensitive, not only in matters of the heart, in sympathy, in kindness, but in intellectual things.”
Hugh laughed.
“Oh, how nice it sounds!” he cried. “Do let us all go and be Æolian harps!”
Then, with one of his quick eager movements, he turned to Peggy.
“That’s the other ideal,” he said. “To catch all there is and turn it into song.”
But Peggy was grave.
“But there are so many things that can’t be turned into song,” she said, “and since I very wisely recognise that, I try to turn them into shillings. There is no romance about a wretched family dying of lead-poisoning and there is no song about it except funeral hymns. Besides, I gather that Hugh wants to be an Æolian harp. Well, that’s just what I want him to be. The whole point of the argument has been that he should turn things into song at Covent Garden.”
She got up.
“We must go,” she said, “because we have to be there at the rise of the curtain. Will you follow us in a hansom, Æolian harp?”
The two sisters drove off together in the motor, which was the only thing of her own that Peggy laid claim to.
“Me conventional!” she said, with a sudden spurt of indignation. “Or am I?” she demanded, turning to Edith.
“I suppose everybody who is very young like that thinks other people rather conventional,” she said. “But to be conventional in that sense is unfortunately necessary, if one is to do anything with life. One hasto choose one’s line and stick to it, and not mind about other lines—disregard them, in fact.”
“But he didn’t call you conventional,” said Peggy, still humorously indignant. “Besides, I want people to work. It makes them happy.”
“Ah, it makes you happy, you mean; and, of course, many people would be happier if they did work. But I am not sure that working may not be a sort of substitute only for the great thing.”
“What’s the great thing?”
“Why, living. I never feel sure that working is not a sort of drug that makes us dream we are living. To be really alive matters so much more than anything.”
Peggy looked at her in some alarm.
“Pray say none of those dangerous things to Hugh,” she said, “or we shall certainly never hear him in Tristan!”
“I am afraid he thinks of them for himself,” said she. “But the mistake he makes is in thinking that working interferes with living. It doesn’t. People who can’t live only get a substitute for it in work which will make them happy, but people who are really alive are not less so by working.”
“Ah, that is much sounder!” said Peggy. “Here we are in thequeuealready. It appears to extend from the Circus to Hyde Park Corner.”
Edith gave a little groan; something, either the discussion at dinner, or those with whom she had discussed, had completely taken her mind off what was coming. The sight of thequeue, however, recalled her.
“Aren’t you hugely excited?” continued Peggy. “How can you help being? And yet you look as if you were going out for a drive in the country to see the place where Izaak Walton was born.”
“I feel as if I were going to see the place where Edith Allbutt was buried,” remarked that lady, “and it appears to me to be gruesomely interesting. And the whole world seems to be coming to the funeral service.”
“Ah, but not a soul guesses who Andrew Robb is!” said Peggy. “I feel sure of that.”
“But Mr. Grainger, probably among many more, said that it was quite obvious there couldn’t be an Andrew Robb. It did seem unlikely when he mentioned it.”
“But if it’s a huge and howling success, as I know it will be,” said Peggy, “won’t you unmask Andrew?”
Edith shook her head.
“Not till the play is established,” she said. “When it has run fifty nights I will.”
Again she groaned slightly.
“It hasn’t run one yet,” she said tragically, “and perhaps it won’t. Oh, Peggy, I know I have fallen between several large hard stools. ‘Gambits’ isn’t risky, so one section of the audience will yawn; it isn’t melodramatic, so another section will cough; it doesn’t contain any horse-play, so a third will fidget. I quite realise that now, and I shall join in the booing myself. How do you boo? Never mind, I shall soon know. And at the dress rehearsal this morning nobody appeared to know one single line of his part, and the curtain stuck at the end of the second act.
“Ah, but, as told you, a brilliant dress rehearsal means failure!” said Peggy. “And isn’t it just possible that a section of the audience will like a play because it is neither indecent nor farcical?”
“I don’t think so,” said Edith. “But in any case I shall be a Turveydrop of deportment, and shall join in the booing.”
“That will be insincere,” said Peggy.
They were in plenty of time for the rise of the curtain, and indeed the orchestra had only just begun to play what was called an “arrangement” from “La Tosca” when they took their places. Hugh, who with masculine cunning had directed his cabman to have nothing to do with thequeue, but to drive boldly up the centre of Piccadilly and stop in the middle of it opposite the theatre, had got there before them, and was already in the box, watching the rapid filling-up of the theatre. Certainly the production of this piece had roused considerable interest, and some minutes before the curtain rose the house was packed in every corner, while the shrill buzz of conversation, always so eager and expectant on a first night, nearly drowned the arrangement from “La Tosca.” For London, whatever its faults may be, is, like Athens, passionately fond of anything new, and the production by one of the best-known actor-managers in the middle of the season of a play about the author of which nothing was known was an event that thoroughly aroused its curiosity. The stalls and boxes were crammed, the pit was one huddle of close-packed faces, and the gallery was as if a swarm of bees had settled on it. Higher and more shrill rose the buzz of conversation from all parts of the huge hothouse, glittering with lights. Then suddenly the lights went out, the orchestra stopped, a rustle of settlement sounded in the darkened theatre, and the curtain went up. Hugh, too, settled down with a sigh of contented expectancy.
“I am so nervous!” he said. “Just think of Andrew Robb.”
The act was rather long and though there were no signs of impatience audible in the house, yet the skilled observer of audiences would not have been completelysatisfied with the quality of the silence. They were silent, it is true, and their silence probably betokened attention, but it was not as yet the throbbing palpitating silence that shows absorption. As in all first acts, a good deal of preliminary work had to be got through; the lady in the blue dress had so to characterise herself in half a dozen lines, that even if she appeared—as she probably would—in the second act in a totally different colour, there could be no mistaking that it was she; the lady in green had tobeMrs. Ashworth and no other; all the coining of personality had to take place, so that it came hot and ringing from the genuine human mint. Also the lines of circumstance had to be laid down; and it should have been clear to the mind of the skilled what the reasonable outcome must be. Only it was not quite clear; there were still nebulous points, and on the fall of the curtain Hugh instantly put his finger on what seemed to be the weak point.
“Rather long, wasn’t it?” he said. “And weren’t there too many aimless bits of talk? Oh, they were well written; I thought the dialogue excellent, just like people, but one wants plot, and one wants point.”
Peggy glanced instantaneously at her sister.
“Ah, but what seems to be pointless in a first act may prove to have very sharp points!” she said. “One can’t tell. There certainly were a lot of excursions in the dialogue, and, of course, if they prove to lead nowhere, the play is hopeless. But one has to see.”
Edith moved so that she sat in the shadow of the curtain.
“Yes, the criterion of the first act is the last,” she said. “You can’t tell if it is a good first act till you have seen the end. Don’t you think so, Mr. Grainger? I quite agree, though, that it seemed long. It seemed frightfully long to me.”
Hugh shook his head.
“No, I think you ought to know or guess at the last act from the first,” he said—“or anyhow guess two or three possible ends. Here you can’t. Look at the hero! At least, I suppose Mr. Amherst is the hero. But he never knows his mind from one minute to another. He is utterly inconsistent.”
“But isn’t it possible that his weakness of purpose may be the point of the play?”
“I never thought of that. Oh, but how interesting if it is so! But it can’t be, because that would make him like a real person, and modern plays never resemble real people in any way. No; I bet you it is a bad play. Mr. Amherst is going to develop some totally new and overpowering characteristic which will make the whole of the first act a waste of time. Do bet!”
“On the possible ability of Andrew Robb?” asked Mrs. Allbutt. “I have seen nothing to warrant it.”
The opinion of the house in general tended to coincide with Hugh’s; and the critics, those Olympians of the intellect, who can leave a theatre not before eleven in the evening and have a column about it in their respective engines of the press next morning, yawned, gathered together in thefoyer, with a sense of coming futility. Those, too, who had come in obedience to Peggy’s commands wondered whether Andrew Robb might not be some discovery of hers whom she had found scribbling fragments of dialogue in the dinner-hour at the leadless glaze factory. Certainly it was very clever of him if this was so, and also very clever of dear Peggy, even if it was pushing leadless glaze rather far. No doubt at her little gathering to-night after the play one would glean something. And the band, having chopped “Pagliacci” up into bits, like murderers trying to conceala body, was silent again, and the curtain rose for the second time.
It had not long been up when silence of quite another quality began to spread like some waveless tide over the theatre. What had seemed idle talk in the first act took significance, and on what was dark and featureless a dawn, sad enough no doubt but intensely human, began to show the contours of landscape; the audience began to “see.” Little careless sentences, remembered because of a certain distinction and unusualness in them, flashed back again into the brain; here was their meaning; they were plot, they were character. And the inconsistent, vacillating hero became every moment more pathetically human. His inadequacy in dealing with little things developed into the helplessness of a weak man before things that are not little. Poignant domestic suffering, remediable probably by a strong man, seemed to paralyse him; he could not make his move, his gambit. Slowly too and inevitably the counteraction of her who was becoming his adversary was apparent.
It was a short act, and the curtain came down swift as the guillotine knife with supreme dramatic fitness the moment that the whole of the position that had through indecision become almost irremediable was revealed. Then for a moment there was dead silence and afterward, before any applause, a huge buzz of eager conversation, everyone talking to his neighbour, argumentative, each with his own idea of the solution, of the gambit that would be selected in the third and last act. To the audience the play had ceased to be a play; it had become a piece of life, and in an hour the actors had become old friends. Stalls argued right and left; boxes were knots of eager disputation; the pit was babel. And for some three minutes this went on.
Hugh was characteristic of the rest.
“Oh, I am glad I didn’t bet,” he said, “because, of course, that is the point! He might do several things all of which would be characteristic. What heavenly people, poor wretches! Why, they are like you and me—so I suppose we’re heavenly too. It isn’t a play at all. It’s It! What will be the way out? Why, we are in the theatre after all!”
He stood up and began applauding violently. The same fact—namely, that they were in a theatre—seemed to strike the rest of the house simultaneously, and from the buzz of conversation there rose the storm of clapping and shouting. And once again Peggy looked secretly across to her sister.
The usual barbaric ceremonies followed; the principal actor appeared, with a fearful grin on his face, bowed, and retired. He came on again and did it again. Then for the third time he appeared, hand-in-hand with the leading lady, and repeated this double appearance. Again and again he appeared each time leading on an additional character, in the manner of “The House that Jack Built,” till everybody who had been seen at all, down to the typewriter who was mute throughout the action, had joined his procession. Then the curtain went finally down, and stray bars of “Cavalleria” were occasionally heard, for nobody left the theatre, but continued arguing till it went up again.
Tense silence, but after some ten minutes somebody blew his nose. Pure, simple pathos, the striving of a weak man to do his best and finding his best failing was there. But with that a certain bravery, foreshadowed from the beginning, a quiet courage began to grow out of the wreck. And then came the simple solution, quite unexpected but absolutely sincere and inevitable,sad perhaps with the sadness of sunset, but bringing its own consolation in the fact of the hot weary day being over.
It was long before Hugh would leave the box, for he was one of those who like to say “Thank you!” when they have enjoyed themselves, and the procession had to pass again and again before he and the rest of the house were in the least satisfied. Then Mr. Amherst had to explain that Andrew Robb was not present, he had to thank his friends, he had to say that their pleasure was his, and that he did not know when he had been so deeply touched. Yes, and Mr. Robb really was not present.
Eventually, however, the three left the house. Hugh was going on to his dance, and saw the two sisters into their motor. There was a block ahead of them, and till it cleared he talked to them through the window.
“I shall come to ‘Gambits’ every night,” he announced, “and all day I shall search for Andrew Robb.”
“And when you find him?” asked Peggy.
“I shall black his boots, if he will let me. I shall learn to fold clothes and apply for a place as his valet. What a heavenly mind he must have! I——”
And the block dissolved and the motor moved.